DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 25A: The Second End of Ghul’s Labyrinth

They stepped forward into Elestra’s sanctuary. The wall closed behind them, transforming itself into a fireplace with a crackling fire already lit. Directly above the fire, a mirror was hung.

“What is this place?” Tee asked.

“A secret,” Elestra said, looking around with a sense of vague familiarity overwhelming her. “I think I’ll be able to open a doorway to this place no matter where we might be. We should be safe here. No one can see the entrance from the outside.”

Elestra is an urban druid.

The seed of this custom class came from an article in Dragon Magazine #317, but although the original packet of photocopied pages are still nestled away in the player’s folder, we’ve made any number of alterations to it over the years.

The original impetus was that Elestra’s player was interested in playing a druid, but it didn’t seem like a good fit for an all-urban campaign. She proposed playing the urban equivalent of a druid instead and I was able to pull the Dragon Magazine article from my archives.

Which, I suppose, is the first lesson when you’re looking to customize the game: See if somebody else has already done the work for you.

Actually, as we’ve continued customizing the class — modifying it to reflect both her vision and my vision of what an “urban druid” should be — most of what we’ve done is basically the same thing, with the only twist being that I’m frequently re-skinning material to achieve the desired effect.

“Re-skinning” something in an RPG system just means that you’re taking a mechanical element designed to model one thing in the game world and instead using it to model something else. For example, in this session you can see an example of how we’ve re-skinned a rope trick spell with a flavor conducive to the urban druid (i.e., opening the walls of a city and literally crawling inside them).

I’m a big fan of re-skinning. In fact, the very first RPG article I ever published was about re-skinning magical spells. (It appeared in an electronic fanzine distributed through the old Prodigy online service.)

Until recently I had a vague memory that I’d been introduced to the concept via an entire article discussing it in Dragon #162 (which was my first issue of the magazine). But upon going back to verify that, I discovered it was actually just one sentence in an article about roleplaying intelligent undead by Nigel D. Findley:

Finally, a lich fascinated with the aesthetics and nuances of magic, rather than its eventual outcome, might have eccentric versions of familiar spells: magic missiles that look like multicolored sparks, or fireballs that explode accompanied by a musical tone, for example.

I think I may have been conflating memories of the fanzine article that I wrote with Findley’s off-hand suggestion, but this is still a great re-skinning technique. And I’ll actually employ it on-the-fly when running NPCs: I’ll see that they have some vanilla spell in their spell list, but then describe it with radically different special effects in actual play. (In some cases, the players have then made a point of seeking out the enemy spellcaster’s spellbook so that they can learn the intriguing variant.)

The versatility of re-skinning becomes even more apparent when you realize you can also make small changes while re-skinning: Grab a goblin stat block and give it +2 armor to model a humanoid ant. Or a fly speed and stinger attack to model a humanoid bee.

At a certain point while doing this sort of work, you’ll probably realize that the difference between re-skinning and homebrewing something from scratch is much more of a spectrum than it is a sharp distinction: Using existing elements of a system as a touchstone for how the new thing you’re designing should work is more of a necessity than an option. The nice thing about straight-up reskinning is that it essentially lets you homebrew in the middle of a session without missing a beat.

As a final note, for some reason when I talk about re-skinning mechanics, some people become confused and think that this somehow means that the mechanic is dissociated. The argument seems to be that if a mechanic can model two different things in the game world, it must mean that it’s not associated with either of them. But this is not true: Just because we resolve an attack with a sword and an attack with a mace using the same rules for attack rolls, it doesn’t follow that your character doesn’t understand what a sword or a mace is.

I mention this mostly because I think the sword/mace distinction can be useful for grokking re-skinning: There are some RPGs in which there may be some slight mechanical distinction between a sword and a mace, but even the most detailed RPG is still an incredibly abstract model of the “reality” of the game world. One should not be surprised to discover, for example, that a tree, a crumbling wall, and a cliff face might all be described as a DC 15 Athletics check to climb.

PUTTING THE MYSTERY IN THE MAGIC

The other thing you might note here is that I use the re-skinning of Elestra’s rope trick to further deepen the meta-mystery scenario of the PCs’ amnesia: Her spell creates a place that they both remember and do not remember.

This technique is consistent with Putting the “Magic” in Magic Items, in which I wrote:

All of this advice can really be boiled down to a simple maxim: Life is in the details.

The difference between a cold, lifeless stat block and a memorable myth is all about the living details that you imbue your game world with.

If you let something like a rope trick spell exist in your campaign as a purely mechanical construct, then it will generally have only the blandest of utilitarian function. But when a spell truly lives in your campaign world, it can become an expression of personality, a clue to a deeper mystery, possess any multitude of meanings, and form any number of vivid memories.

And re-skinning can help unlock all of that potential.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 25B – Running the Campaign: Player-Initiated Vectors
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Running Gags Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Behind the Tale of Itarek Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Roleplaying Ability Damage